It has been a rough few months for people interested in grabbing a Steam Deck. A few months ago, Valve announced that it was scrapping the Steam Deck LCD version, which meant that people who wanted to give portable PC gaming a try had to shell out a little more to do so. Some would even recommend a Switch 2 over a Steam Deck at this point.

Sleeper laptop. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Business laptops are typically dull computers foisted on employees en masse. But higher-end enterprise workstation notebooks sometimes get an interesting enough blend of power and features to appeal to enthusiasts. HP's ZBook Ultra G1a is a nice example. It's easy to see it as another gray boring-book for spendy business types, until you notice a few key specs: an AMD Strix Halo APU, lots of RAM, an OLED display, and an adequate amount of speedy ports (Thunderbolt 4, even - a rarity on AMD laptops).I know from my time with the Asus ROG Flow Z13 and Framework Desktop that anything using AMD's high-end Ryzen AI Max chips should make for a co …Read the full story at The Verge.

Linux distros come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and there is no "strictly better" distro out there. It all comes down to what you want from your OS and how you want it to act. For instance, I adore how Fedora introduces updates at a rapid rate, but other people will want their OS to take things easy and not cram in new features until it has undergone rigorous testing.

Since the xAI-SpaceX merger announced last week, which combined the two companies (as well as social media platform X) for a reported $1.25 trillion valuation - the biggest merger of all time - a handful of xAI employees and two of its co-founders have abruptly exited the company, penning long departure announcements online. Some also announced that they were starting their own AI companies. Co-founder Yuhai (Tony) Wu announced his departure on X, writing that it was "time for [his] next chapter." Jimmy Ba, another co-founder, posted something similar later that day, saying it was "time to recalibrate [his] gradient on the big picture." Th …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I replaced my dead 5900X with a used 5800X3D last year, I expected an immediate improvement in how games felt. Not necessarily higher average frame rates, but better consistency. The 5800X3D has a reputation for fixing stutter and improving 1% lows, especially in CPU-bound games like Valorant and Counter-Strike 2. At first, the upgrade felt fine, as my GPU usage went up and benchmarks showed the kind of gains you'd expect from removing a CPU bottleneck.

Highguard, a new multiplayer shooter from developers who worked on games like Apex Legends and Call of Duty, launched just over two weeks ago, but developer Wildlight Entertainment is already cutting jobs at the company, according to posts from affected staffers on LinkedIn. Former Wildlight level designer Alex Graner says that "most of the team at Wildlight" was laid off today, which was backed up by former lead tech artist Josh Sobel."Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game," Wildlight says in a …Read the full story at The Verge.

The hours-long closure of El Paso airspace stemmed from the use of an anti-drone laser deployed by Customs and Border Protection, according to reports from The New York Times and the Associated Press. Sources tell The Times that CBP officials didn't give the Federal Aviation Administration "enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft," leading to the abrupt shutdown.On Wednesday, the FAA closed the airspace around El Paso International Airport, citing "special security reasons." The move impacted commercial flights and emergency medical transportation. Though the agency initially said the closure would last 10 days, it reopened …Read the full story at The Verge.

Commercial smart alarm clocks run $50 to $150 for a device that does exactly what the manufacturer decided it should do. You can't expand it or change it, and what you bought is what you get. Mine, on the other hand, cost about $15, does exactly what I want, and ties into my Home Assistant setup.

NotebookLM is the closest thing to magic Google has released in the last three years. For the free tier, it is an absolute steal because you dump a 50-page PDF, a YouTube URL, and a messy Google Doc into a bucket, and it churns out a coherent Deep Dive audio overview that sounds more human than half the podcasts I listen to. It’s the best-focused generative AI tool on the market, hands down. It hallucinates less, grounds its answers in your personal data, and typically behaves like a competent research assistant.

All good things come to an end, and Microsoft products are no different. While the company will sometimes announce the retirement of an app mere months away from the cut-off date (like it did with Microsoft Lens), sometimes it give us a little more time to adjust and adapt. Such is the case with Microsoft Publisher, with the company announcing its retirement with over two years of support remaining for the app.

Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren't being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Departm …Read the full story at The Verge.

I don’t enjoy typing out long voice recordings, whether it’s an interview clip, a meeting recap, or a rough idea I dictated while walking. Manually turning audio into text is slow, and absolutely no one should be doing it in the big year 2026. There are plenty of AI transcription tools that solve that problem, but they introduce another one. Your recordings get uploaded, processed, and stored on infrastructure that you do not control. As much as I dislike typing out voice notes, I would still rather not share them with just anyone. Instead of relying on those services, I run Whisper locally. It is an open-source speech recognition model released in 2022 under the MIT license, and it allows you to transcribe audio completely offline.